Stefan Moritz’s 2005 thesis Practical Access to Service Design

About the paper

This paper introduced as a way for practitioners to deliver value for their organisation. This paper looked at the development of and describes where it is at today.

It gives people that work with services an understanding of, and practical access to, Service Design.

The service economy is booming yet clients are not always satisfied, and the service sector is still less productive than the manufacturing sector. 1 is a new field in which user oriented strategies and concepts are designed to make services work better for an organisation and their clients. is offering a competitive advantage for organisations and ensuring quality experiences for clients. For example it helps organisations to offer better services than their competitors and to raise clients awareness to the service they consume. However, so far only a few organisations use it. 2 Why? The paper explores this question, identifies how possible tasks can be addressed by and it develops a model that groups tasks into a workable framework. Which tools can be used to enable? Which can be identified in other disciplines? How can some of them need be adopted to Service Design? And overall: Which ones can be developed specifically for designing services? The paper also helps identify the skills required to manage and become active in and explores a set of tools that are helpful to achieve those tasks

We are surrounded by services every day. We listen to the radio. The window cleaner makes sure that the sun can shine into our apartment. Our mail is delivered. The hairdresser gives us a new summer cut. We borrow books from the library. We go online, book our holiday and finally take the plane to the Caribbean. And that is not new. Services have been around for centuries the old Greek and Romans had servants and even prior to that services were provided and also paid for. Still, we are aware that some things have changed dramatically in the last say 25 years.

We have reached the end of the monopoly of the industrial era. In the end of the 19th century the steam machine, bigger factories, new inventions and methods pushed a mass of cheaper goods in the market. The industrial revolution created an ocean of cheaper and better products in developed countries. Today, most households have two TVs, an electrical toothbrush, a car, and most of us stereos and PCs. Like the industrial revolution that transformed society and economy we are now about to experience the service revolution.

About service design

Service Design is a new holistic, multidisciplinary, integrative field. It helps to either innovate or improve services to make them more useful, us- able, desirable for clients, as well as more efficient and effective for organisations.The service sector makes up the biggest part of the economy, up to 70% of GDP. However, services are not as productive for organisations and as satisfying for clients as they could be. Services have a design problem.

Professionals in the service sector need to realise that they are involved in design and use Service Design to improve it. Services have unique features. They are not tangible, cannot be stored or owned, consumption happens at the same time as production and they are complex experiences that happen over time. Therefore, designing services requires special considerations.Design as a whole has changed and Service Design can address the unique challenges that the service economy is facing. Design is not only crafting details of products anymore. It is a field that designs complex and interactive experiences, processes and systems. It involves expertise and experts from related fields and clients in the design process. It uses special processes, tools and methods.

The first thorough publication on Service Design, Stefan Moritz’s masters thesis still is a good source for an introduction to Service Design. Recently I’ve started to use it a source to show how service design is evolving. Example: how co-design was discussed in 2005 compared to the role it has in SD today.